This Is the Worst Advice You’ve Ever Received
Why being “realistic” is the last thing you should do.
Every dreamer has been told by someone to “be realistic”.
That person trying to convince you to be realistic is the same person who gave up on their dreams and now wants you to do the same.
This is the worst piece of advice anyone can be told, especially someone who has an entrepreneurial spirit.
If you haven’t figured it out by now… You shouldn’t listen to those people.
They want you to play the odds
What does it actually mean to “be realistic”?
The simple answer is that you should do what is most likely to happen. You should play the odds.
This makes sense at first. Who wants to be disappointed after all?
But, the further you dive into it, the more you begin to realize that you don’t know your odds until after you’ve tried.
On top of that, life would be quite boring and we would see little to no progress if we all played the odds.
And the worst part is that it is likely going this route would leave you unhappy and feeling unfulfilled.
You’d end up feeling unaccomplished because you never gave anything a real shot.
The odds vary from person to person
Dr. James Austin in 1978 talked about the 4 different kinds of luck.
Blind luck
Luck from motion
Luck from awareness
Luck from uniqueness
The main takeaway from what Dr. James Austin talked about is that you can influence your luck.
For example, if you are a deep sea diver who looks for treasure, and someone else finds gold in the ocean, but doesn’t have the skills to retrieve it, they will come to you to help.
Now, you aren’t the lucky person who found the gold, but without the skills you’ve been working on for years, this amazing opportunity would have never come to you.
You got this lucky opportunity because you worked on the right skills.
Many people would mistake this for “blind luck”.
However, in reality, you created luck by building up a unique set of knowledge.
Now, let’s go back to your odds.
When someone tells you to “be realistic”, they are referring to what is realistic to them… not you.
You could have been fighting all your life, training in Muay Thai and Jiu Jitsu, and the accountant will tell you to be realistic because you’ll never make it to the UFC. Instead, he recommends going to business school like he did.
Maybe for him as an accountant, it is not realistic, but to you, the fighter, it is.
In fact, it might be more likely you make it to the UFC than you succeed in the business school!
This is my point…
You should play the game you know best and are most comfortable with taking risks in because the odds of succeeding vary based on who you are and what you spend your time on.
Excellence is never realistic
Nothing great has ever been accomplished unless it was against the odds. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be great…
Steve Jobs creating the most valuable company in the world starting in his garage was highly against the odds. Especially with juggernauts like IBM in the same industry.
Michael Jordan becoming the greatest basketball player ever, despite still being average if not below average in high school was against the odds.
Elon Musk creating a new car company, not to mention an electric car company and making a rocket land safely was nearly impossible.
“At the beginning, I thought Tesla and SpaceX maybe had a 10 percent chance at success” - Elon Musk
Those who want you to be realistic prefer to “be safe”. They don’t have what it takes to be excellent and simply have a lower risk tolerance so they want to put the same restrictions on you.
If you want to achieve greatness, you can’t play by the odds.
If you want to achieve greatness, you can’t listen to others.
Excellence does not come from being realistic.
Innovation is not created by the realistic
A big problem arises when everyone starts to be “realistic”.
As I mentioned above, excellence comes from beating the odds.
Well, guess what… Innovation comes from excellence.
Innovation is essential for our world and humanity. It is all about doing more, with less.
By continuing to innovate, we’ve been able to:
Beat viruses and diseases
Farm more land with fewer people
Travel further distances with less effort
Connect the world through the internet
And the list goes on.
None of these innovations were realistic. These innovations came from excellence and they came from those who beat the odds - the risk-takers.
As we innovate, the quality of life for each individual increases and so does our lifespan.
To continue to strive as a species, we need more people to be unrealistic. We need more people to try and beat the odds.
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” - Steve Jobs
You’re existence was never realistic to begin with
It is said that there is a 1 in 400 trillion chance of being born. Regardless of what number you put on it, it is clear that the fact that you are here in the first place is nothing short of a miracle.
You’ve been beating the odds from the moment you were born.
Think of how many times in the past you got lucky. The times when things just fell into place the way they were “supposed to happen” even though it was not realistic.
Your genetic pool beat the odds in the past and that’s why your family tree still goes.
Your ancestors weren’t killed by the Spanish flu or in one of the many wars we’ve had before they passed they replicated.
You are lucky.
You are not realistic.
You have been excellent from the moment you were born.
Closing remarks
At the end of the day, people who tell you to be realistic don’t know who you are. They are placing limits on what they believe you can accomplish based on their life experience.
But, they don’t know what you’ve been through. Even if they are your parents, they weren’t there every second.
Only you know what the best thing to do is.
And rarely is that to be realistic.
Thanks for reading.
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